Tag Archives: Business Elite

My breaking point came in T2 at Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport as I stared down the barrel of a ten-hour layover with no lounge access. This was after a schedule change and seating change on my outbound flight from JFK to Santiago the night before in an attempt to make it to Iguazu Falls.

At this point, I’d been traveling for over 24 hours.

I hadn’t slept.

And I still had over 12 hours left to go, culminating in a border crossing between Brazil and Argentina at the un-Godly hour of 3am.

That was it — I’d had enough. So, I decided to throw in the towel, cut my losses and head home.

I scoured the Internet from the domestic terminal at GRU looking for award flight availability back home, and found some viable options. I was reluctant to blow miles on a trip home, but was resigned to do so until I had a Facebook chat conversation with a friend who works for Delta. He graciously offered me a buddy pass to get me back to the States that evening. The best part about it?

It was in business class. And there was plenty of non-rev space available open that evening. I took my friend up on his offer, paid some nominal fees and taxes, and I appeared on the stand-by list for DL 472 to JFK — a flight that would sent me right back to the airport I’d departed less than 24 hours before.

I arrived at the gate about an hour prior to departure and let the gate agent know I was there, per instructions from my friend. After all revenue passengers had boarded, my name was called and the gate agent handed me a boarding ticket for seat 6B, in business class! I was going home…

To counteract these devaluations, one might think that United may increase award availability so it’s not all bad for the consumer. Alas, that is not the case. Though United continues to have pretty good saver award availability on international awards, it has become increasingly hard to find a saver award — particularly for a premium cabin on a transcontinental domestic flight.

These flights are operated by two-class Boeing 757-200s with a special, two-class configuration featuring 28 lie-flat, business class seats. I was alerted by a friend that the availability of these seats is absolutely dismal, so I looked into it and then decided to compare it with the availability of “saver” level award seats in both Delta and American’s programs.

Below are the availability calendars for United’s Premium Service Saver-level award availability for JFK-LAX for the entire schedule.*Yellow denotes saver economy space is available. Blue denotes BusinessFirst is available, and Green denotes both economy and BusinessFirst is available.

That’s right. For the entire year, there is award space for only three dates for BusinessFirst — and all are within the next three days.

The availability is much the same for the opposite direction: LAX-JFK: 3 dates in the next year; ironically enough including Christmas Eve.

I then decided to look at the other United Premium Service route to San Francisco, only to find similar results (I’ll spare you all the calendar shots.)

JFK-SFO: Slightly better, with 6 days of BusinessFirst open

SFO-JFK: The worst of the whole bunch: only 2 days with BusinessFirst saver open, and very little economy space open at all.

After seeing this paltry availability for United, I figured that surely it was probably just as bad for Delta and American.

Upon studying the Delta award availability (which is much more difficult to navigate than United’s), I found that on its JFK-LAX premium route with all flat-beds in its Transcontinental BusinessElite product, there was actually pretty good availability for saver-level seats after September. In fact, in October, it’s pretty wide open (the Green dates indicate Saver availability). The same was true with return flights from LAX-JFK.

Delta’s Domestic Award Chart

It is worth noting that Delta has a couple different levels of “Saver” awards, based on seasonality, so a Saver award could cost you either 50,000 or 65,000 round trip (since no one-way awards are offered on Delta). Delta’s online award search engine is also vastly inferior to that of United, so there’s always that.

American Airlines had a simllar pattern of availability as did Delta. Though this summer’s business or first class “MileSAAver” level availability was slim-to-none, it looked pretty good after August. Below is American’s chart for Business class MileSAAver awards on its non-stop JFK-LAX route on its new A321T, 3-class “Flagship Service” flights. It’s also worth noting that first class availability was just as readily available after the summer time.

So what does this tell us?

For starters: don’t plan on being able to use your United miles to fly on its Premium Service flights anytime soon. This is just another deficiency that’s a result of a littany of #flyerUNfriendly “enhancements” to United’s formally industry-leading MileagePlus loyalty program.

Though it faces major competition in a continually evolving US air travel market, United seems to cherry-pick the things that it copies from other airlines, such as Delta’s Skymiles medallion qualification and revenue-based earning program. At the same time, it seems to ignore other very important things such as creating operational efficiencies by decreasing the reliance on regional carriers, and rewarding customers with at least making premium transcontinental flights obtainable with miles. It could always mean that United is filling all these high dollar seats with paying customers while their competition is not, but given United’s recent reports of profitability (or lack thereof), I really doubt it.